Demolition industry continues to break down barriers

As the book closes on 2020, the demolition industry won’t soon forget a year filled with challenges, ups and downs, and new ways of doing business. 

“We had what started off as a great year, but we took the roller coaster down pretty rapidly, and then it’s come back and it hasn’t been as bad in some areas as we expected,” says Chris Godek, owner of New England Yankee Construction and president of the National Demolition Association (NDA), which represents nearly 500 construction firms.

Coming into the year with a sense of optimism, the demolition industry was quickly met with a new set of challenges. However, breaking down barriers is often just another day on the job for demolition contractors.

“There’s a sense of resiliency in a demolition contractor’s mind,” says Jeff Lambert, executive director of NDA. “They look at a project that nobody else can do, and they figure out a way to get it done. They’ve figured out ways to move their companies forward during these times.”

The road ahead

Demolition contractors have remained busy throughout 2020 thanks to a healthy backlog coming into the year. But as travel slowed due to stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures, state tax revenues shrunk, casting uncertainty over funding for new projects in the months to come.

“Every single member I talk to, everybody is just busy day to day and they’re pleased with the amount of work that’s been coming in,” Lambert says. “My concern, and I think our members’ concern, too, is tax base and what’s going to happen if that starts to dry up and some of these larger projects are canceled. With these longer projects, is that pipeline going to cease because of state and local tax funds?”

When forecasting an outlook for what’s ahead, NDA looks at the future through a binary lens: short term and long term.

“We’re optimistic in the short term, and in the longer term, we’re hoping it doesn’t go south,” Godek says. “Most of us have gone through the Great Recession, and even fewer of us went through the recession of the early ‘90s. In both of them, the faucet was just turned off and the pipeline of revenue just stopped. I think a lot of our members are concerned about that.”

Going forward, project cancellations are top of mind for NDA, as delayed or canceled projects can be somewhat of a litmus test for where the industry is headed.

“Luckily, we haven’t seen any cancellations at my firm, but they are happening,” Godek says. “What that does to contractors is, where we kept people on because we realized our backlog is ripe and robust, we start to realize we can’t hold this person for six or eight weeks because of a job coming up, and we don’t need that depth on the bench right now, which turns into job numbers going down.”

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